How to Build CI/CD Dashboards with Grafana

Want to optimise your CI/CD pipelines with clear, actionable dashboards? Grafana can help you track key metrics like build times, failure rates, and deployment frequency - all in one place. This guide breaks down:

• Why CI/CD dashboards are crucial for efficient DevOps.
• Tools you need, including Grafana, Prometheus, and Jenkins.
• Setting up and securing Grafana for UK-specific needs.
• Automating dashboard deployment through CI/CD pipelines.
• Best practices for designing, maintaining, and improving dashboards.

Whether you're aiming to speed up deployments, reduce errors, or cut cloud costs, this guide provides step-by-step instructions to get started.

Monitoring Production grade Jenkins using Prometheus, Grafana & InfluxDB | Monitoring With Grafana

Prerequisites and Environment Setup

To set up Grafana for CI/CD dashboards, you'll need to align key tools with UK infrastructure standards for optimal performance and compliance.

Required Tools and Integrations

At the heart of this setup is Grafana, which transforms metrics into actionable visualisations. For collecting these metrics, Prometheus is a top choice, adept at gathering data from various sources. Meanwhile, InfluxDB serves as an excellent option for storing time-series data. If you're leveraging public cloud infrastructure, AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Google Cloud Monitoring integrate seamlessly with Grafana, making them well-suited to UK-based organisations [2].

Automation platforms are essential for CI/CD workflows. GitHub Actions can handle automated dashboard deployment and updates, while Jenkins, when equipped with the Prometheus plugin, provides detailed build and deployment metrics. This plugin ensures Jenkins metrics are presented in a format Grafana can process [4].

For those seeking managed solutions, Grafana Cloud is worth considering. It eliminates the need for infrastructure management, offering a reliable, hands-off experience.

Grafana Cloud probably saves us hundreds of engineering hours a year. - Ryan Grothouse, VP, Engineering [1]

Additional tools can enhance your setup. Grafana Alloy and Grafana Agent are capable of scraping metrics from Jenkins, while the grafanactl CLI tool simplifies automated dashboard deployment via GitHub Actions workflows [5].

Once you've chosen your tools, proceed with installing and configuring Grafana alongside these integrations.

Setting Up Grafana

The installation process for Grafana depends on your deployment method. For organisations in the UK, Grafana supports installation across various platforms, including Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, SUSE, macOS, and Windows [3]. These installations can be tailored to meet local compliance requirements, such as date formatting (DD/MM/YYYY) and decimal separators.

Self-hosted installations require a database backend. While SQLite is sufficient for smaller deployments, larger organisations should opt for MySQL or PostgreSQL. Ensure the database connection string is configured for UK time zones (GMT/BST) and supports British English character encoding.

Security should be a priority during setup. Implement secure cookie settings and header policies to guard against CSRF attacks. Activate Content-Security-Policy headers and conceal version numbers to reduce vulnerabilities [8].

For network security, restrict data source URLs to approved IPs or hostnames [6]. Configure firewalls to block unauthorised access and consider deploying Grafana behind a reverse proxy with CORS headers enabled for added protection [6]. These measures ensure your dashboards remain secure and reliable, which is critical for CI/CD optimisation.

For organisations using Azure, the Digital Marketplace offers Azure Managed Grafana. This service operates within Microsoft datacentres that comply with EU energy efficiency standards, ensuring sustainability and performance [7].

Connecting Data Sources

Once you've selected your tools and integrations, it's time to configure data sources. Reliable connections are key to accurate CI/CD monitoring.

• Prometheus integration: Configure scrape targets to collect metrics from your CI/CD infrastructure. Define job configurations to gather data from Jenkins, application servers, and deployment environments at regular intervals.

• Jenkins integration: Install the Prometheus plugin in Jenkins to expose metrics at the /prometheus endpoint [4]. Use Grafana Alloy or Grafana Agent to scrape these metrics, capturing critical data like build times, success rates, and queue lengths. Jenkins plays a pivotal role in automating software development tasks such as building, testing, and deploying applications.

• Cloud monitoring services: Set up authentication and permissions for your chosen cloud provider. For AWS CloudWatch, use IAM roles with read permissions. Azure Monitor requires service principal authentication, and Google Cloud Monitoring needs service account credentials with monitoring viewer permissions.

• Database connections: Optimise performance with connection pooling and timeout settings. Where possible, use read replicas to distribute query loads, ensuring dashboards remain responsive even during high-traffic periods.

• Data source caching: Enable caching for frequently accessed metrics and configure TTL values to balance data freshness with performance. This reduces strain on backend systems while keeping dashboards quick and responsive.

Test all connections thoroughly to ensure smooth operation. Verify that data sources respond correctly and that authentication credentials are valid. It's also a good idea to monitor the health of your data sources to catch connectivity issues before they disrupt your dashboards.

Automating Dashboard Deployment via CI/CD Pipelines

Automating Grafana dashboard deployment through CI/CD pipelines ensures uniformity, minimises errors, and maintains version control. By treating dashboards as code and integrating them into CI/CD workflows, teams can streamline the process of deploying, updating, and managing dashboards across different environments. Let’s break down how to achieve this using defined code, pipeline configurations, and validation techniques.

Dashboard as Code

Instead of manually creating dashboards in Grafana, you can define them as code using JSON or YAML, which makes version control, reproducibility, and error reduction much easier. These formats allow teams to programmatically manage dashboard configurations.

• JSON: This is the most commonly used format since it aligns with Grafana's native structure. Existing dashboards can be exported as JSON files and stored in a Git repository, creating a centralised and auditable source of truth.
• Grafana Foundation SDK: For those seeking more flexibility, the SDK allows dashboards to be defined using programming languages like Go, Python, Java, or TypeScript. This method introduces type safety, reducing the risk of errors that often arise with manual JSON editing.
• YAML: YAML offers a more human-readable alternative. Its indentation-based structure makes it easier to visualise the hierarchy of panels, queries, and settings, simplifying collaboration and updates.

By storing these configurations in version control systems like Git, teams can track changes, collaborate effectively, and ensure consistency across environments.

Pipeline Configuration

Once dashboards are defined as code, the next step is automating their deployment. This involves configuring a CI/CD pipeline using tools like GitHub Actions or Jenkins. The pipeline performs tasks such as checking out the repository, setting up the runtime environment, and deploying the dashboards using tools like grafanactl.

• Environment Variables: Use environment variables to secure sensitive details like Grafana server URLs, stack IDs, and API tokens. These are stored as repository secrets, ensuring they don’t appear in the code. This method also makes it easy to adapt the pipeline for different environments by simply updating the variables.
• Pipeline Triggers: Pipelines can be configured to deploy dashboards automatically on every push to the main branch or on a scheduled basis, such as during off-peak hours. This flexibility allows teams to choose a deployment strategy that minimises disruptions.
• grafanactl: This CLI tool simplifies dashboard deployment by handling authentication, error reporting, and dashboard updates. It can deploy entire configurations or make targeted changes to specific components.

Automated deployments not only save time but also help optimise operational costs by reducing manual intervention and potential errors.

Validating and Updating Dashboards

Validation is a crucial step in ensuring that dashboards function as intended. Incorporate checks for syntax, data source connectivity, and synchronisation to avoid issues during deployment.

• Syntax Validation: The pipeline can parse JSON configurations to catch errors like missing fields before deployment. For teams using the Grafana Foundation SDK, build processes will flag compilation errors, preventing invalid configurations from going live.
• Dashboard Existence Checks: To streamline updates, the pipeline can query Grafana to check if a dashboard with a specific UID already exists. If it does, the pipeline updates the existing dashboard; if not, it creates a new one.
• Code vs Deployed Dashboard Comparison: After deployment, the pipeline can retrieve the dashboard configuration from Grafana and compare it to the source code. Any mismatches trigger alerts, enabling teams to address discrepancies quickly.

Rollback procedures are another important safeguard. By maintaining dashboard versions in Git, teams can easily revert to previous configurations if issues arise. The pipeline can automate this process, triggering rollbacks in response to deployment failures.

• Environment-Specific Configurations: Inject environment-specific variables - like data source URLs or alert thresholds - into the pipeline to ensure dashboards are correctly set up for development, staging, and production environments without duplicating code.
• Deployment Notifications: Keep teams informed by sending deployment updates to Slack, email, or other communication platforms. Notifications about successful deployments or errors ensure everyone stays up to date and can respond promptly to issues.

Finally, basic post-deployment tests can confirm that data sources are accessible and visualisations render correctly. While these tests don’t replace comprehensive validation, they provide a quick way to catch obvious problems, ensuring that dashboards remain reliable and effective for monitoring.

Best Practices for Designing CI/CD Dashboards

Crafting effective CI/CD dashboards requires thoughtful planning around what to monitor, how to display data, and how to cater to the needs of different teams. A well-structured dashboard turns raw data into practical insights, empowering teams to make smarter decisions.

Key Metrics to Monitor

The backbone of any impactful CI/CD dashboard is choosing the right metrics. Start with the build success rate, which reflects the quality of your code and the stability of your pipeline. A high success rate suggests reliability, while frequent failures can point to issues in the codebase or testing processes [9].

Metrics like build duration and deployment frequency are essential for gauging pipeline efficiency. Frequent deployments indicate agility in adapting to changes, and shorter build times mean quicker delivery of updates or fixes [9].

Good CI/CD metrics help align development with business goals. [9]

To maintain software quality, track metrics such as test coverage and test failure rate. These reveal how thoroughly your code is tested and pinpoint areas that need attention, helping to prevent bugs from slipping into production [9].

Another critical metric is lead time for changes, which measures the time it takes for code commits to reach production. This directly impacts how quickly you can respond to market demands or resolve critical issues. Alexandre Walsh, Axify's VP of Engineering, offers this advice:

One rule of thumb is to try to double your deployments and halve your incident rate. It's simple, and it's relative for everyone. Even a less mature team can aim to double deployments, just as a more experienced team can [9].

Once you've identified the right metrics, it’s time to focus on how to display them effectively.

Optimising Visualisation Layouts

How you present data can make or break the usability of your dashboard. Use time-series graphs to show trends over time and gauges for instant feedback on KPIs. Colour coding - green for good, amber for caution, and red for critical - helps users quickly grasp the status of key metrics.

For detailed information like deployment histories or failed builds, tables are a better choice. Arrange your dashboard so that high-level KPIs are prominently displayed at the top, giving executives a quick overview, while more detailed data is positioned lower down for technical teams to dive into.

Keep the design intuitive. Use meaningful colours and normalised chart axes to make data easier to interpret [11]. Avoid cluttering the dashboard with too many metrics; each visual element should convey a single, clear insight.

Customisation and Filtering

Once your metrics and layout are in place, tailor the dashboard to suit the needs of different teams. Customisation enhances usability and ensures everyone sees the data most relevant to their role.

Template variables are a great way to avoid duplicating dashboards. These allow users to adjust views based on environment (e.g., development, staging, production), team, or application [11]. Similarly, tags can be used to categorise dashboards, making it easier to locate the right one. For example, tags like frontend, backend, or specific team names can streamline navigation [12].

Dashboard links can connect high-level overviews to detailed, application-specific dashboards, allowing users to drill down efficiently [12]. For teams working across different time zones, customising time settings - like time zones or auto-refresh intervals - ensures data remains relevant and up-to-date [12].

Security is another important aspect. Use team-based permissions to control access to sensitive information. For instance, Grafana Teams lets you group users with similar permission needs and manage access to dashboards, data sources, and alerts [10].

To make dashboards even more effective, consider creating role-specific variants. Developers might need detailed logs and test results, while managers benefit more from high-level trends. Tailoring the dashboard to specific roles ensures users get the data that matters most to them.

When you monitor these metrics and take correct actions based on them, you streamline continuous delivery and – even better – stay aligned with your business goals. [9]

Finally, understanding your audience is crucial. Regular feedback sessions with dashboard users can reveal which information is most valuable and what can be removed. This ensures your dashboards stay relevant, evolving alongside your team’s needs and continuing to provide actionable insights. Customisation like this strengthens the efficiency and transparency of your continuous delivery processes.

Maintaining and Evolving CI/CD Dashboards

Creating effective CI/CD dashboards is just the start. The real challenge lies in keeping them accurate, relevant, and valuable as your organisation grows and changes. Like automated deployment processes, dashboards require consistent upkeep to avoid becoming outdated or misleading.

Version Control and Change Management

Treating dashboard configurations like code can transform how you manage changes and maintain consistency across environments. Adopting GitOps practices ensures every modification is tracked, offering a reliable way to keep dashboards accurate and up to date.

Storing dashboard configurations in Git allows you to track changes, quickly revert problematic updates, and maintain a clear audit trail. Instead of making adjustments directly through a web interface, you can apply the same rigorous change management processes used for application code.

This guide will walk you through setting up a continuous deployment pipeline using ArgoCD to synchronize your Grafana dashboards with a Git repository. [13]

Tools such as ArgoCD and the Grafana Operator can streamline this process. ArgoCD monitors your Git repository for changes and automatically applies updates to your Grafana deployments, ensuring consistency across development, staging, and production environments. Meanwhile, the Grafana Operator manages Grafana instances and dashboards declaratively within Kubernetes.

By combining these tools, you create a strong GitOps workflow. Changes to dashboards are proposed via pull requests, reviewed by senior developers, and automatically deployed once approved. This approach prevents configuration drift, ensures that fixes or updates are well-documented, and makes it easy to roll back changes when necessary.

Incorporating Team Feedback

Dashboards serve a variety of stakeholders, from developers and operations teams to management, all of whom have different needs. Regularly gathering feedback is essential to ensure dashboards remain effective and useful.

Set up structured channels to collect actionable feedback. Retrospectives and post-incident reviews are great opportunities to discuss what works, what doesn't, and what might be missing. For example, you could ask teams which metrics they find most helpful, which visualisations are unclear, and what additional information they’d like to see.

Create an environment where feedback is welcomed and valued. Regularly solicit feedback from team members on the CI/CD processes and tools being used. Conduct retrospectives and incident reviews to review what's working well and what needs improvement. Use this feedback to make iterative improvements to your CI/CD pipeline. [14]

Involve team members from different disciplines in dashboard discussions. Operations engineers might highlight technical metrics that developers haven’t considered, while product managers could suggest business-focused visualisations. This collaborative approach not only improves dashboards but also fosters better communication and teamwork. The insights gained from feedback help fine-tune dashboards to meet evolving team needs.

Regular Review and Updates

Feedback is just the first step. Regularly reviewing and updating dashboards ensures they stay aligned with current objectives. Without this attention, dashboards can collect outdated metrics, broken queries, or irrelevant visualisations, reducing their overall value.

Schedule routine evaluations to assess each dashboard’s relevance and accuracy. Are the metrics still aligned with team goals and business priorities? Are there visualisations that no longer provide useful insights? Removing outdated elements and adding new, relevant metrics ensures dashboards continue to provide value.

Watch out for dashboard sprawl, where redundant or similar dashboards clutter the system. Consolidating these can make navigation easier and help teams focus on the most critical visualisations.

Analyse usage patterns to identify which dashboards and visualisations are actively used and which are ignored. This data can guide decisions about where to invest resources and which dashboards might be retired. Update alert thresholds and notification rules as your systems evolve - what was normal a few months ago might no longer apply.

Consider seasonal or cyclical changes in your business when reviewing dashboards. For instance, an e-commerce company might need different metrics during peak shopping seasons, while academic institutions may adjust their focus around term dates. Documenting significant changes and their rationale ensures that future team members can understand the dashboard’s evolution and the reasoning behind key decisions.

Expert Consulting for Advanced Solutions

Creating effective CI/CD dashboards requires more than just technical know-how - it demands strategic planning, customisation, and optimised cloud infrastructure. Many UK businesses grapple with challenges like overly complex dashboards, ballooning cloud costs, and deployment inefficiencies that slow down development teams. By leveraging expert consulting, you can refine and tailor your dashboards to overcome these hurdles and align them with your organisation’s unique needs.

Customised CI/CD Dashboards

A one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work when it comes to CI/CD dashboards. Every organisation has its own set of requirements, and Hokstad Consulting specialises in creating bespoke solutions that meet the specific needs of UK businesses. These dashboards are designed to align with local compliance standards, such as GDPR, and seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure.

The process begins with a detailed analysis of your CI/CD architecture. Key metrics are identified, and intuitive visualisations are crafted to make complex data easy to understand for both technical and non-technical team members. This ensures that your dashboards not only monitor performance but also address unique business and regulatory challenges.

What sets these dashboards apart is their scalability. As your organisation grows, your monitoring needs will evolve. Professionally designed dashboards can adapt to these changes without requiring a complete overhaul. This forward-thinking approach saves both time and resources, making it a smart long-term investment.

Advanced DevOps and Automation Support

Custom dashboards are just the start. Hokstad Consulting goes further by helping businesses optimise their entire CI/CD workflow through advanced DevOps practices. Automation plays a crucial role in streamlining the development lifecycle, and their expertise in this area has delivered impressive results for UK companies.

Hokstad Consulting helps companies optimize their DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and hosting costs without sacrificing reliability or speed, and we can often cap our fees at a percentage of your savings. [15]

Their track record speaks volumes. For example, a tech startup working with Hokstad Consulting slashed its deployment time from 6 hours to just 20 minutes. This transformation not only sped up deployments by 75% but also reduced errors by 90% [15].

The approach involves implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices and setting up advanced monitoring systems to reduce operational overhead. By auditing your current processes, identifying bottlenecks, and applying proven automation strategies tailored to your technology stack, Hokstad Consulting ensures sustainable improvements that drive measurable results.

Cloud Cost Optimisation

For many UK businesses, managing cloud infrastructure costs is a growing concern. Rising expenses can strain budgets, but Hokstad Consulting offers solutions that can cut costs by 30–50% while maintaining performance and reliability [15].

Their approach goes beyond simple cost-cutting. By right-sizing resources, they ensure you’re not paying for unused capacity. Intelligent automation reduces manual intervention, and smart resource allocation ensures your monitoring infrastructure scales efficiently based on actual usage rather than worst-case scenarios.

The process begins with a thorough audit of your current cloud spending. Opportunities for optimisation are identified, and cost-monitoring systems are implemented to prevent future overspending. This proactive strategy ensures your CI/CD dashboards remain both cost-effective and scalable as your organisation grows.

Hokstad Consulting offers flexible engagement options, including remote services and on-site support in London. Their retainer-based models provide ongoing optimisation, and their no savings, no fee policy aligns their incentives with your business goals [15][16][17]. With this approach, you only pay when measurable cost reductions are achieved, making it a risk-free investment in your organisation’s future.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Creating effective CI/CD dashboards in Grafana can revolutionise how UK organisations manage their development workflows. By streamlining monitoring and optimising processes, these dashboards significantly enhance efficiency. Moving from simple monitoring setups to fully automated dashboard management takes careful planning, but the benefits are undeniable.

Key Takeaways

The best CI/CD dashboards share some essential qualities. Using Dashboard as Code ensures that updates are consistent and version-controlled. Automation is another cornerstone - organisations that weave dashboard deployment into their CI/CD pipelines enjoy quicker updates and fewer manual errors.

To keep dashboards relevant and manageable, regular maintenance is a must. Consistent naming conventions for metrics and labels simplify both their creation and upkeep. Leading organisations treat dashboards like any other code asset, incorporating reviews and storing them in centralised repositories.

It's also crucial to train teams to avoid making manual changes directly in the Grafana UI. Instead, all modifications should go through version control processes. This approach prevents configuration drift and ensures the monitoring infrastructure remains stable and reliable.

With these principles in mind, you’re ready to start building your own CI/CD dashboard.

Getting Started

Begin by setting up Grafana and connecting it to the necessary data sources. Start small - create a single dashboard that tracks key CI/CD metrics like build times, deployment success rates, and error frequencies. These metrics provide immediate insights and value.

For efficient deployment, configure file watchers and Grafana API keys. This setup allows you to quickly roll out dashboard updates during development while maintaining proper version control for production environments. Use Grafana provisioning to automatically reload dashboards from a designated directory, cutting down on manual tasks.

Before expanding your dashboard portfolio, establish a clear observability strategy. Document your approach and ensure your team understands the review process for dashboard updates. Regularly monitor dashboard usage to identify which visualisations are genuinely useful and which can be retired.

As your dashboards evolve, consider seeking expert advice to unlock advanced capabilities.

Exploring Expert Support

The CI/CD tools market is projected to grow from nearly £940 million in 2024 to over £4.3 billion by 2034 [18]. As organisations scale their CI/CD operations, expert guidance can help them progress faster and avoid common challenges.

Hokstad Consulting is one example of a firm specialising in advanced CI/CD implementations. Their expertise goes beyond dashboard creation, focusing on orchestrating automated testing, security scanning, and infrastructure provisioning, all while implementing intelligent monitoring strategies. For UK businesses aiming to enhance their DevOps workflows, professional support can lead to measurable improvements in performance and cost efficiency. This aligns perfectly with the goals of reducing cloud costs and improving deployment cycles discussed throughout this guide.

The CI/CD landscape is continually evolving, with developments like intelligent alerting, predictive analytics, and seamless integration with development tools [18]. Expert consultants can guide organisations through these advancements while keeping their focus on tangible business outcomes. Whether you're implementing Infrastructure as Code, improving pipeline performance, or exploring advanced automation, professional advice ensures your efforts deliver long-term value.

If your dashboards need to scale beyond basic monitoring or if managing cloud infrastructure costs has become a challenge, it might be time to bring in expert support. Combining technical expertise with strategic planning can transform your CI/CD operations into a competitive advantage, helping you achieve faster deployments and cost savings while strengthening your overall DevOps strategy.

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